Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) is under a lot of scrutiny these days.
That's mostly because he sold stock holdings following a congressional briefing from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about the COVID-19 coronavirus back in February before the market plummeted (Burr has denied he was acting upon any privileged information), but now some ethics experts are concerned about the sale of his Washington, D.C., home in 2017, ProPublica reports.
The senator sold the townhouse to a team led by donor John Green, who lobbied on behalf of clients before Burr's Senate committees that same year, as well as in the past. Aside from the general worries about lawmakers entering into business transactions with donors or lobbyists, ethics experts are concerned about the sale primarily because some believe the house was sold for a price above market value. Green's team bought the home for $900,000, while tax assessors valued it at a little under $800,000 and the real estate website Redfin pegged it at a little north of that mark. If the sale was above-market, it would theoretically violate the congressional ban, and some ethics experts were convinced it did just that. "This has every appearance of being a violation of the gift ban," Craig Holman, a lobbyist for the watchdog group Public Citizen, told ProPublica.
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However, real estate agents said gauging market value can be a challenge, and that it may have been sold at a fair price. A spokesman for Green provided ProPublica with an analysis showing similar homes in the area were sold in the general price range around the same time. It was also sold off-market, which can sometimes lead to higher sales because buyers don't want to compete with anyone else. Read more at ProPublica.
